Religious Bioethics: An Emerging Framework for Pluralism in Medicine

The history of medicine is replete with accounts of conflicts in approaches to therapeutic treatments, but the long trajectory in Western medicine has been one that has striven toward evidence-based conclusions about how to treat disease. In other words, scientific medicine has specialized over the past century in order to measure and achieve improved outcomes, and it may be said that in the many cases where no treatment is fully or even partially effective, the role of medicine is diffused in directions that extend far beyond experimental protocols and specialized decision making.

The domain of uncertainty in both clinical and research medicine has over the past fifty years brought many new voices into the conversation about what to do in those situations where medical treatment is inadequate. A turning point that has emerged in one sense is that the limits of this inadequacy are less a public matter of incompetence and malpractice and more an objection to lack of access and escalation in cost. This is happening in an historical moment when the debate about access and cost are inevitably pitted against progress in pharmaceutical and genetic developments.The emergence of bioethics in the 1960s began in what today would be called a “social justice” vernacular, with ethical investigations that began with research on prisoners (and interestingly, research on the fetus). As bioethics evolved into more of an academic field guided principally by philosophy and law, the role of religion was less apparent. Nevertheless, the field of bioethics began in institutional forms from a decidedly Catholic commitment that shared essential continuity with pastoral medicine of the 19th century. By the 1960s, the secularization thesis was at its height, and so, the Hastings Center and Kennedy Center sought to distinguish themselves from encyclical direction and to contribute to a more secular and national conversation at that time. ​This paper describes this process, along with the evolution of a distinctive Jewish bioethics and a brief account of Protestant deliberations that emerged from distinct denominational traditions. A preliminary sketch will be offered of how each respective tradition has begun to shape national and international conversations about the relationship between faith and medical responsibility.